Funny, the comment types here are the same as on Youtube:
- “I still run Android and it is totally fine, will never switch Android just got worse!”
- “Well, money”
- “Companies need to support phones longer”
- “I just use LineageOS on that device”
- Misinformation
Why surprised? They’re still selling stuff with Android 11
There are so many OEMs that are dropping new phones every week and obviously don’t have resources to support the previous phones after 6 months
I bought a brand new Redmi for my mom in September 2022 and the latest update available as of today (security update) is dated July 2022
Wtf! Crazy…
I’ve been looking for some e-ink tablets running android, and all the ones I found on chinese sites were sold with android 11.
I dont know why Android 11 is such a sweet spot. Waydroid also uses it.
The update ecosystem is still continuously being crippled by both the device vendors, and for some fucking reason, the carriers
they don’t really need to now that google has moved a lot of the core functions into google play
I don’t blame the users. There’s usually no way to upgrade android versions, so we get stuck unless we replace the phone, and most people can’t afford to replace their phones so often. I’d go further and say that people shouldn’t be supposed to replace their phones because of a new software version. The android’s distribution model is flawed, we should be able to upgrade our phones the same way we upgrade linux distros. If it was possible, then I would blame users for running unmaintained software.
Keep in mind that many Linux users have Laptops with no firmware updates anymore.
But I agree of course, we need laws for that
Who cares. Play Services backwards compatibility for new Android APIs and security updates being separated from the OS make this irrelevant.
No.
Yes
No. Android is a lot more than Play services. Like, you can run it without them and it is still Android.
But security patches for the OS come outside of the firmware. Also I haven’t heard of a serious exploit in a while.
According to GrapheneOS devs, a lot of security issues are inside the firmware
I don’t believe them
My 4GB phone was perfectly usable on Android 11. It upgrade itself to android 12 and it’s basically can’t keep a second app in background anymore.
Borked update by manufacturer. What device if I may ask?
Xiaomi Redmi note 10.
Ah, xiaomi. I don’t know if it’s the same with Mi branded smartphones. But, that was my experience with Redmi smartphones.
i’m running 14 on an S4 mini, i think they made some great changes
Google bloat.
My 3gb of ram works fine with background apps and Lineage OS 21. (Android 14)
Try a lighter custom ROM if you can. LineageOS’s implementation of Android 14 is still usable with a 4 GB device.
Changing ROMs is a huge pain. Not only it can brick the phone, full backups were basically made impossible long ago. It’s best to do it as soon as you purchase the phone and that’s what I am gonna do.
Nah, it’s pretty easy. I’ve done it many times myself. You have to be pretty unlucky or stupid to brick a phone.
did it many times too and never bricked a phone. The fact that there’s a chance that it can brick a phone is the problem. Were I live, even the cheapest phones cost a month worth of salary, so if you brick s phone, you’re basically without a phone for months as you slowly gather the funds to buy a new one.
It is normally soft bricked. You just need to wipe it and start over
I’ve never heard of completely dead phone from a rom.
To flash a custom rom you usually use a custom Bootloader like TWRP, and if the bootloader is fucked, the phone is pretty much dead.
It isn’t needed with Lineage OS as it has its own recovery tools
Agreed. Now if only I could find a good device. I am very picky with hardware. I want a Motorola phone with a headphone jack and Lineage OS that works in the US.
I will note that you need to do a complete wipe when changing Roms. It breaks random things in the OS
High-tier Xiaomi phones usually have headphones jacks and really good hardware . I don’t know about lineage OS, but there’s a EU roms for Xiaomi phones that get rid of all their useless shit. The weirdest thing is that it’s actually a kinda-official custom ROM.
nowadays, all the phones are pretty similar in terms of perf, unless you’re into mobile gaming/video editing/AI, it doesn’t matter. A 12GB Ram, 512GB phone is completely future proof. Heck, if there’s ever a desktop mode added on Android, it’s more than enough for 99% of regular computer usage.
I have found that 3gb and 32gb storage are enough
3GB RAM, maybe. 32 GB ROM ? No…
It works for me. Also if I ever need it I do have a micro SD
It works well with a 3gb device. I honestly was expecting it to croak but it works better than new phones with Google junk.
My phone was on 11 and wasn’t receiving security updates so I said fuck it and installed lineage os. Nice experience so far, hoping to make this phone last at least a few more years.
LineageOS has very slow updates. Also they dont have access to all the code they need. I dont even know if they port a newer Kernel to these devices, so they likely still run the outdated, vulnerable kernel they used before.
Also, they dont have access to the Firmware signing keys so they cant deliver firmware updates, which (especially mobile network stuff) causes a ton of security issues.
Sucks…
Lineage OS is updated monthly. Also what are you talking about? The code is all available and under a libre license I might add. From a kernel perspective you can’t just port a newer kernel. That’s not how Android works. It has been done on some devices but it is very hard and usually very impossible for one reason or another.
From a signing perspective I don’t know but usually you get the firmware from the upstream manufacturer such as Qualcomm. From a security perspective phones aren’t very good as the modem runs its own software and is a total black box.
I don’t understand your motivations
The code is all available and under a libre license I might add. From
Not the proprietary drivers that vendors may build into their versions of Android.
From a kernel perspective you can’t just port a newer kernel. That’s not how Android works. It
Tell my why?
It has been done on some devices but it is very hard and usually very impossible for one reason or another.
The kernel is highly modified, yes. Porting is a ton of work, which is exactly what I said. Thats the reason why there is no support for newer kernels most of the time.
you get the firmware from the upstream manufacturer such as Qualcomm.
Yes and if they stop sending it, you dont get security patches here anymore. Cant sign it, cant patch it. What I said.
as the modem runs its own software and is a total black box.
Absolutely. Luckily Airplane mode is pretty good.
I don’t understand your motivations
People here tell a lot of wrong things. Like that LineageOS could support devices fully after they are dropped by their vendor. Or that running some old version of Android is fine, while they just focus on UI elements.
“Wrong things” are just your opinion. You and people like you are the reason I don’t care for Graphene OS. Take your throwns else where.
No, thats not an opinion. But to be honest it doesnt matter what you use. That just matters to you and people close to you.
Galaxy S10 Android 12 UI 4.1 til the wheels come off (a.k.a banking/gpay apps stop working due to lack of latest security updates), there are no advances in the last 6 years that I’ve owned my phone which in any way have tempted me to throw out another thousand dollars for.
I doubt you have followed all CVEs fixed in newer Android versions.
I’m still on 11, waiting on reviews for what phones have actually good phone signal. Haven’t really run in to any issues so I’m in no rush.
The bad thing about security is, you only notice you are fucked when it is too late ;)
I doubt it as the Android security model is actually pretty good. It isn’t immune but neither is anything else. It is all about least privilege. There is no root so the worse case is you just uninstall something manually.
Yes Android is way more secure than any random Linux distro. But you can still get hacked.
I mean, that’s true, but paying $500 for a security update is a bit obscene given the rest of my phone is more powerful than i actually need despite being old and cheap. Until I find one that has very good signal or my current one breaks properly, I’m not burning that money for a device that i literally wont be able to tell is faster.
It is not about speed. Security is abstract.
Device manifacturers obviously didnt have security in mind. And still, new phones are sold because of strange features nobody needs, instead of 10 years of updates and a headphone jack.
Not to brag but I still do have a headphone jack. Gonna guess the security update being from 2022 is a bad thing though lmao
I mean, you can be on airplane mode with bluetooth and wifi off in public spaces. I would need to use a dongle (which doesnt exist! I needed to buy the Apple one)
Funny enough, i actually disable bluetooth when I’m not using it, and i don’t use wifi on the phone (no home internet, so it isn’t gonna connect to anything anyway).
I’m gonna miss the rear fingerprint sensor as well when i finally replace it.
True, in-display sensors are complete garbage. Slow, flashing in your face etc.
Idk if they are more secure (accurate) but they suck.
Google really needs to decouple the hardware from the OS. There’s no good reason newer Android couldn’t be installed on older phones.
Google doesnt do anything here. The OEMs need to port the Android kernel to older hardware.
They often just support one LTS kernel.
But Android even supports the LTS kernel for 6 years now.
Wrong. Google had multiple projects like Treble to decouple the software from the hardware. What happened with it?
You can run new android on an old kernel, see lineageos
You can, but often you lose certain APIs or need to fall back to software compensation for stuff that’s supposed to be hardware backed. Custom ROMs won’t pass validation without fixing this, but custom ROM users probably don’t care as much. There’s no way commercial vendors will be able to push Lineage to mobile networks or get access to the Play Store through official means.
Yes and this is not secure. The kernel runs as root.
Google develops Android and thus is responsible for it’s update scheme. They already changed it quite a bit in the last years with GSIs and Project Treble but there’s still no real seperation that would allow the same drivers and hardware blobs to be used independent of the Android Version or updating the Android version without these needing to be included every time.
That’s what needs to change.
Google develops Android, but vendors fork Android. Google can’t update Samsung’s Android because they’re not the same code base. The situation is not dissimilar to the relationship between Debian and Pop_OS, or Arch and CachyOS. Google (Debian, Arch) can patch their repos and distribution, but if Pop and Cachy update their copies, their users won’t get any updates.
Out of frustration about this, Google is pulling more and more stuff into Google Play Services, like the Chrome runtime, the location framework, contact tracing, you name it. Many open source enthusiasts absolutely hate that, but it’s a direct result of vendors not applying freely available patches to their ROMs.
Google offered (and to some extent still offers) to make updates for vendors, but almost nobody bought phones that came with their ROMs. Vendors didn’t want Google’s ROM because their software is the only reason to pick their glass bricks over their competitor’s. That’s why only cheap, pretty shit budget phones still carry Google’s ROM these days.
With GSIs, Google did actually write a HAL that should make binary drivers compatible across versions. The custom ROM I’m currently using doesn’t even seem to package these drivers, they’re left in the /vendor partition and loaded like normal. Some drivers need to be linked against the specific kernel because they’re devices Google hasn’t thought to make an abstraction layer for yet, but things like camera drivers are now decoupled.
This is why GSIs exist in the first place. Unfortunately, the lack of upstream kernel code from companies like Qualcomm means that power management and some other hardware is completely broken if you just flash a GSI on a random phone.
A big problem with specifically Samsung phones is that Samsung refuses to load their camera firmware if you’ve unlocked the bootloader on some phones. The entire OS is designed to make the camera work regardless of ROM image, but Samsung chooses to sabotage alternative ROMs anyway. Google can’t fix that.
Their own phones have support for the mainline kernel. It is the vendors that dont want to upstream their drivers and produce half-proprietary garbage they dont publish, so nobody can update these devices.
But Googles decides, that that is possible. I fthey changed the structure to enforce a seperation there’s nothing that would keep Android updates from those devices. Put all hardware and device specific stuf in a seperate layer and have it accessible to the updatable system. And it’s not like these vendors have an alternative to go to
Put all hardware and device specific stuf in a seperate layer
Could you elaborate?
Android uses Linux, a monolithic kernel. You cant just separate drivers.
I also heard that OEMs write horrible drivers, which wouldnt work on a microkernel without maaajor porting issues.
And there are Linux distros with rolling releases, where the drivers stay where they are and the OS around them gets updated without issue. I’m sure the smart people at the Android team could do something similar
The drivers are in the kernel, kept updated with every release. As I said, pixels at least boot with mainline kernel support, but the Android kernel is modded.
And then manifacturer use out of tree drivers as core part of their kernel.
The kernel is the problem
It’s not like the end users typically get any choice… either the service provider makes an update available or they don’t.
Samsung and Google sell phones with seven years of support or even longer now. We didn’t have that choice seven years ago (well, there was iPhone, but nothing like that on Android), but this problem has already been solved.
Of course, phones with support cost more and not everyone is willing to pay for that, but there’s plenty of choice these days.
Your choice is making sure to buy a well supported, timely updated device. If you can’t is a different issue. But, if you don’t is on you. Vote with your wallet.
Vote with your wallet
Buy new device if old one isn’t supported anymore
Hmm
As long as my provider is selling me service for the device then they have a responsibility to support it and provide upgrades. I do vote with my wallet by not being on the upgrade treadmill.
Your choice is making sure to buy a well supported, timely updated device.
Sure, that choice is currently available, but it wasn’t when many of those devices were purchased. For example, I’m currently using a Galaxy S10e which had just about the best support of any Android phone. Now I’m stuck on Android 12. I actually planned on using it with Lineage, but somewhere between my S7 and the S10e, Samsung stopped using Exynos in their Canadian phones, and I didn’t realize it. The hardware is still more than good, and as others have pointed out, with Play Service updates, the software isn’t really obsolete either, it’s just a concern I’m not getting security updates.
same with my S10, at some point though app vendors will stop allowing their apps to run on our o/s and security versions, i think we still have a couple years before that happens, but eventually it’s going to happen, and on that day i will curse the gods
Samsung is especially bad as they lock out security features for custom Android versions. (It is not a ROM, it is an OS).
GrapheneOS would support Samsung, maybe. But they allow many critical security features like measured boot (I think) only for their own OS.
S10e. I was talking more about current devices. The next device you upgrade too should be better. Be it samsung, pixel, fairohone, oneplus, etc.
Personally, I am still on 13 using lineage OS. I have been offered Android 14, but in order to do that, I might have to either wipe my device or at least plug it into a computer and neither of which I particularly want to do at the moment. Running Android 13 has been perfectly fine for me.
Didn’t lineageOS allow OTA updates like regular android smartphones?
For patches to the same version, yes. But, for upgrades between versions, not yet. At least not that I’m aware of.
Now, GrapheneOS on the Google Pixel can update between versions and security patches to the current version too. So it’s fully there, but to my knowledge, lineage does not allow version upgrades.
Bummer, this increases the friction for upgrades.
Yeah, it most definitely does. Though, on the other hand, you get a device with the newest lineage on it, and you can hold onto that for 4 or 5 or 6 years, and then upgrade, and just put lineage on the new device when you upgrade. And you jump like 7 versions at a time. The big problem isn’t necessarily upgrades as security patches.
I think it is suppost to be a safety mechanism to keep you from jumping without looking. You can just download the image to an SD card. I sometimes do that for regular updates as it is often way faster.
I recently upgraded from android 13 to 14 on Lineage and didn’t have to wipe but to be honest, there was nothing new. Only back gestures were an interesting addition
Were you able to do it over the air or did you have to connect to a computer to do so?
No, “ota”
You dont see security patches…
It is patched monthly. Also there hasn’t been a lot of major security issues with Android. It has a pretty tight security model.
Android is pretty secure. The kernel is highly stripped down, so it is more like a microkernel. Like, removing support for most filesystems etc.
They also moved a ton of things into userspace, I think their entire filesystem uses fuse.
Android is really good.
But still, LineageOS may implement all the minimum AOSP patches. But Google Pixel phones get more than those.
And monthly is of course slower than weekly, bjt expected if you support such a vast range of devices.
Then the issue of course is, is the firmware still supported? Where do the kernels come from?
These are likely out of reach for the devs.
Also, their OS is very generic, just AOSP with mostly cosmetic changes.
Where GrapheneOS implements tons of deep modifications, which makes updates and maintenance a bigger task. These features also cause more bugs which need fixing.
Weekly updates wouldn’t work at all and would take lots of time. From a Lineage OS perspective they maintain there own apps as the AOSP ones are abandoned. They all match the Android 14 UI. Also the default web browser is actually a usable browser.
I don’t really understand the Graphene OS die hards. At the end of the day they are both from the same source. The issues with Graphene is it has a lot of extra bloat and complexity. It also is not really stock AOSP which isn’t as nice. Lineage OS isn’t stock either but they don’t make changes unless it has a very really cosmetic benefit. I don’t really care for Graphene OS.
I can’t think of a single thing that’s changed in Android since like Android 9. There’s no reason to upgrade.
Just because you cant think of anything, that doesnt say nothing has changed.
Google hides it a bit, but Android 9 is years ago. 5?
Just study the GrapheneOS release notes alone
My point wasn’t that nothing changed. My point was that if I haven’t noticed the changes, they must not be important. I would be perfectly happy with Android 9 right now. It would make zero difference to me, so why would I go out of my way or pay money for a new phone to upgrade?
Because Android 9 is not supported with security updates since forever
Why is it funny again?
Also stock Lineage OS with just F-droid is the way to go. It is clean and simple.
F-Droid is also targeted at very old Android devices. On modern Android, “F-Droid Basic” is better.
It really isn’t. F-droid is built for currently supported versions of Android. F-droid basic is just what it sounds like. It is basic and not really usable for me as the layout is goofy.
LineageOS was not fully degoogled before GrapheneOS devs came and did that. I think now LineageOS also has these patches.
They also dont apply hardening, also not for privacy. The webview for example is just Chromium.
There are a ton of features, all listed on grapheneos.org
Many are pretty technical, a lot of them are for very high threat models. I mean, we still all manage to kinda not get hacked. But that may be because we live under governments that are not full dystopia, yet. Or because we are just boring.
GrapheneOS is likely overkill, but I like to have the most security I can get. These guys are doing amazing work, hacking Android at very low levels. For example they found a way to completely disable the USB port, I think using the same mechanism as the “water detection” would use to shut it off.
Or storage and contact scopes, or the hardening everywhere. Pin scrambling.
A lot could be improved, LineageOS has way better AOSP apps for example. These should land in GrapheneOS.
I’ll just keep using Lineage OS as that’s what works best for me. You can use what you want but my experience is that the Graphene community is toxic and arrogant. I don’t want to be a part of that community. If anything I would use Calyx OS
It is true that there is toxicity and arrogance among these people. I can forgive them because
- They are right (and even if I think they are not, they know more about it so I couldnt out-argument them)
- They work on a FOSS OS that is extremely secure and private. Literally doing the most important work, protecting vulnerable people etc.
- They need to fight against misinformation every day. The amount of noobs on their forum is pretty insane, and a lot of companies and other projects spread misinformation, sell near-EOL or already EOL devices etc.
CalyxOS is way less secure, in a lot of parts. It is mainly just LineageOS.
I’m on 14 but to be honest the only difference I really noticed is GTA Vice City got broken by it I presume it will never be fixed since they seem to have done another version.
So yeah it’s really only taught me not to buy apps again I’m not a fan of the restricted folder/file manager restrictions either.
